Yuki Takahashi

Although the gender gap in mathematics and sciences in OECD countries is negligible, female students are still less likely to major in STEM fields in college, which can lead to suboptimal talent allocation and other social issues. One explanation that has received less attention in the literature is that STEM programs are predominantly male-dominated, which makes female students a minority. We study whether the gender ratio at colleges affects high school students' college choices and the extent to which it contributes to the gender gap in STEM programs. We begin by using administrative data to show that the gender ratio has become more balanced in both STEM and non-STEM programs over the last 15 years, especially in programs where students are supposed to have less trade-off among attributes. We then use an incentivized discrete choice experiment and show that the gender ratio at colleges does affect both female and male students' college choices: both female and male students prefer gender-balanced college programs over those with a male or female majority. Students avoid programs where they will be a minority mainly because they expect it to be difficult to fit into such environments. A counterfactual analysis suggests that the low female student share in STEM programs reduces the likelihood of female students choosing STEM programs by 6.0 percentage points or 15.7\%, and they incur a utility cost equivalent to 0.58 standard deviations of program selectivity. Removing this constraint would lead to female students with high mathematics ability replacing male students with low mathematics but high reading ability in STEM. Thus, the gender ratio at colleges is an important factor for high school students' college choices, and making STEM programs more gender-balanced can help narrow the STEM gender gap, address social issues arising from it, and improve the allocation of talent.

The persistent underrepresentation of women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) is well-documented, with substantial variation across disciplines. Leveraging a curriculum reform in an introductory computer science (CS) course at a U.S. liberal arts college, we show that emphasizing the breadth and broad social relevance of a STEM discipline significantly increased female students’ likelihood of majoring in CS by 13 percentage points relative to male students. The reform also led to improved labor market outcomes: female students who entered under the new curriculum earned, on average, 13\% more than their male peers. These gains were not accompanied by declines in academic performance, as measured by GPA or dropout rates. We explore underlying mechanisms and find that the reform improved the overall retention and persistence among women in CS, attracted more women who planned to major in CS, and drew in new entrants who had not intended to pursue the field. Overall, our findings suggest that women and men respond differently to STEM curriculum and that teaching the social relevance of STEM early on in the curriculum can serve as an effective policy tool for reducing gender gaps in fields where disparities persist.

While successful teamwork often involves correcting colleagues' mistakes, it may have negative interpersonal consequences. In an experiment, I show that it also has negative economic consequences: individuals are less willing to collaborate with those who have corrected them, even when the correction benefits the team. The data are consistent with negative feedback aversion: individuals who initially received positive feedback about their ability are significantly less willing to collaborate with those who corrected their mistakes, but not with those who corrected their right actions. Additionally, I find that men, but not women, are more tolerant of women who corrected their right actions. It is potentially due to men's beliefs about women's abilities, making women's corrections of their right actions less ego-threatening. This reluctance to work with those who provide corrective feedback can undermine teamwork, and mixed-gender teams may attract less competent women due to gendered sorting.

Light abuses and threats to receive them at home can deteriorate individuals' well-being, even in the absence of severe physical injury. Leveraging Russia's criminal law reform that decriminalized minor domestic violence, I first confirm that the number of domestic violence incidents classified as criminal offenses against female partners indeed decreased sharply after the reform. Using a difference-in-differences approach, I then show that the reform reduced married women's life satisfaction, increased depression, and increased college-educated married women's alcohol intake. Suggestive evidence indicates that the reform contributed to a decline in new marriages, while the divorce rate remained unchanged. These changes are unlikely to stem from shifts in violence outside the household, as there were no significant changes in gender-based violence or other crimes during the same period. These findings suggest that even minor intimate partner violence decreases married women's well-being and highlights the importance of legal institutions in addressing household violence.

Although evidence suggests men are more generous to women than to men, it may stem from paternalism and could reverse when women excel in important skills for one's career success, such as cognitive skills. Using a dictator game, this paper studies whether male dictators allocate less to female receivers than to male receivers when these receivers have higher IQs than dictators. By exogenously varying the receivers' IQ relative to the dictators', I do not find evidence consistent with this hypothesis; if anything, male dictators allocate slightly more to female receivers with higher IQs than to male receivers with equivalent IQs. The results hold both in mean and distribution and are robust to the so-called ``beauty premium.'' Also, female dictators' allocations are qualitatively similar to male dictators. These findings suggest that women who excel in cognitive skills may not receive less favorable treatment than equally intelligent men in the labor market.